Sunday, August 08, 2010

Bad Nanny Apple

Thissucks. They censored the erotica from their bestsellers list. It’s Apple’s toy and they can do what they like with it, but I think this kind of control freakery will only end up biting them in the ass. Amazon didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory when all the gay books ‘vanished’ or when the big grab fairy came and took back George Orwell’s ‘1984’ from people’s ebook readers, but at least they had the decency to mumble something about a ‘glitch’ in the first place and a rights fuck up in the other.

Apple, nope. They swept them away and tried to tell us reality was something else, which is never going to work as somebody is going to spot it, and then everybody else will know about it and pretty soon everyone will be looking at their bestsellers list and singing: “We know you’re lying...”

It’s silly. They could have handled it sensibly in any number of ways. Don’t sell the smut in the first place (although that’s bound to result in endless hilarity when someone gets over-zealous and blacklists “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” or “Lolita”). Filter your bestsellers list by price to remove the cheap little novellas. Filter your bestsellers list by genre (Both fine as long as the filtering is stated).

Or suck it up and show a sense of humour in the “Gosh, who’d have thought adults would buy ‘adult’ titles” vein.

Instead they tried to pretend the world is basically flat.

I don’t hate Apple. They make a lot of cool stuff and I love my iPod to bits. But they also have a habit of building nice walled gardens and putting machinegun nests on the walls. And then wondering why the masses deserted them in droves for a competitor’s knock off that doesn’t come with a built-in nanny.